Speaker placement in awkward room

Looking for advice on speaker placement. Mostly for the side surrounds, but any advice is helpful.

My living room is very small and awkward but I’m trying to make it work. The current placement doesn’t sound terrible… but I know it could be better. Ideally I’d like to get the side surrounds on the walls or at least on actual stands/mounts but they’d have to go up high… would that sound ok?

I’m also considering rearranging and pushing the couch against the back wall to get a bit more space in the room for a coffee table or something. Obviously this would take the space my rear surrounds are in, but I could repurpose them as Atmos height channels… I’m a little nervous to ditch 7.1 though as it sounds incredible for gaming… nothing like throwing the axe in God of war and hearing it swirl around your head… but admittedly I never hear much from the rear surrounds during movies and TV.

I’m also interested in any suggestions for acoustic treatments. When the bass hits deep I’m hearing some rattles from that track for the large vertical blind.

Receiver is a Denon x3400-h and I’ve done the full calibration. Also before anyone says it… I had a second sub, it sounded great, it broke, replacing it is not in the budget right now.